Biometric identifiers describe physiological characteristics such as iris, retina, fingerprint, hand, voice, or face. Biometric identifiers can be in the form of essentially raw data as captured by biometric sensors, or processed, such as cropped images, outliers removed or represented in feature form such as a feature histogram.
Biometric computer systems are systems which use one or biometric identifiers to enroll, verify or identify a person. The terms enroll, and register and populate will be used interchangeably throughout this document.
Use of biometrics and multimodal biometrics in biometric systems for access control, verification or identification are increasingly applied to border protection as well as private property access. However, the migration to such biometric systems for a large organisation can be expensive and time consuming due to the large number of people to enroll into the database used by the biometric computer system.
Currently, human operators are needed to manually link a person's biometric signature (comprised of one or more biometric identifiers) to his/her existing employee record. This is however a very costly process. Not only does it cost money to hire people to operate and coordinate the enrolment process, the time lost from employees delayed or taken away from their work to pose for enrolment can also be a significant cost.
An alternative to manual enrolment is to enroll the biometric signature using an existing non-biometric verification instrument, such as an existing swipe, magnetic, or RFID card. In a card-based electronic access control system for example, a card is issued to every user enrolled in the system. The user presents his or her card to a card reader. The reader is usually connected to a controller and a host computer, which can be programmed to identify the user based on the read code. After the user has been identified, information from his/her record can be used to enroll their obtained biometric signature.
Any discussion of documents, acts, materials, devices, articles or the like which has been included in the present specification is not to be taken as an admission that any or all of these matters form part of the prior art base or were common general knowledge in the field relevant to the present invention as it existed before the priority date of each claim of this application.